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(From Enoch Arden)
THE MOUNTAIN wooded to the peak, the lawns | |
| And winding glades high up like ways to heaven, | |
| The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes, | |
| The lightning flash of insect and of bird, | |
| The lustre of the long convolvuluses, | 5 |
| That coiled around the stately stems, and ran | |
| Even to the limit of the land, the glows | |
| And glories of the broad belt of the world,— | |
| All these he saw; but what he fain had seen | |
| He could not see, the kindly human face, | 10 |
| Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard | |
| The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, | |
| The league-long roller thundering on the reef, | |
| The moving whisper of huge trees that branched | |
| And blossomed in the zenith, or the sweep | 15 |
| Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, | |
| As down the shores he ranged, or all day long | |
| Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, | |
| A shipwrecked sailor, waiting for a sail: | |
| No sail from day to day, but every day | 20 |
| The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts | |
| Among the palms and ferns and precipices; | |
| The blaze upon the waters to the east; | |
| The blaze upon his island overhead; | |
| The blaze upon the waters to the west; | 25 |
| Then the great stars that globed themselves in heaven, | |
| The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again | |
| The scarlet shafts of sunrise,—but no sail. | |
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